


Green's Not Your Color

by AuditoryCheesecake



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adoribull - Freeform, Drunken Confessions, M/M, Polyamorous Character, Relationship Negotiation, feelings are hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 10:13:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7753687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuditoryCheesecake/pseuds/AuditoryCheesecake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some conversations are better saved for sober hours. They're usually the ones you want to start when you're drunk.</p><p>Or, "Bull Wants To Talk About His <i>Feelings</i>, Dorian."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Green's Not Your Color

Bull’s telling a story.

Or, well, he’s leading it, because the Chargers’ teamwork is always seamless. He sprawls on his chair with one hand on his good knee and the other wrapped around that outsized mug of his, a smile on his face that says he’s been drinking for hours and thinking about how much he loves his boys. He’ll start saying it, if Dorian waits long enough.

But Dorian’s no longer in the habit of waiting, so he traverses the familiar path from barstool to bench. It’s long since lost its sense of danger.

Bull sees him coming and his smile widens, and softens, and gains that undefinable edge that Dorian treasures. His eye crinkles at the edges and he shifts on the chair. His horns tilt in an inquisitive gesture and he pats his thigh invitingly.

There is an empty chair down the table, between Dalish and Rocky.

Dorian is helpless, though, and thoroughly hopeless, because he passes it by and settles himself with all possible dignity on the Iron Bull’s thigh.

Like the night before, nothing catches on fire, no demons shriek and no doom rains from above.

The tavern ignores him.

The Iron Bull does not.

He wraps an arm low around Dorian’s waist, anchoring him, and mutters something that might have been “I’m glad you’re here,” had he bothered to pronounce all the syllables.

“Is that a tea cup?” Krem asks loudly, and Bull is distracted just before he kisses Dorian. It’s an unhappy sort of relief, and he pushes it away.

“Someone broke all of Cabot’s brandy snifters,” Dorian says, and suspiciously amused glances skitter down the table to land on Sera. She shrugs and grins and says something that sounds suspiciously like “bottoms up,” like that’s any sort of apology for making Dorian drink _brandy_ out of a _teacup._

Bull steals it, the scoundrel, saucer and all, and takes a dainty sip. He makes sure to extend his smallest finger gracefully, and Dorian can’t help the foolish little smile he can feel spreading on his face. This ridiculous man. 

He sputters and coughs, because if Dorian cannot have _good_ brandy he will settle for _strong_ brandy, and that is one front on which Cabot has never disappointed him. Dorian retrieves it gracefully from his hands and knocks it all back in one swallow.

“Damn, kadan.” Bull wipes at his eye and thumps his chest with a meaty fist, coughing some more. “You sure you haven’t been dipping into the medical reserves?”

“A gentleman never reveals his secrets,” Dorian says primly, and settles back against Bull’s chest to watch the night unfold. One day he’ll ask what “kadan” means. Not tonight.

More drinks arrive, courtesy of the Charger’s wellspring of a tab, and they cycle down the table until he is clutching his own mug of Fereldan beer; bitter, frothy and dark. Bull relaxes behind him, legs wide, gestures wider. Always with one hand somewhere on Dorian’s body, always looking down at him for a smile. 

Dorian barely moves-- he doesn’t _want_ to move-- for the next few hours. He sits on the Bull’s thigh, giggling like barmaid while a heavy hand strokes up and down his thigh in a way that is grounding, sweet, and erotic all at once.

Bull’s hand slows, then stops, long before Dorian realizes that he’s dozed off. He shares a glance with Krem and they both smile ruefully. In this one thing they can agree without a single argument.

“C’mon, Chief, it’s last call for you.” Krem slaps Bull’s bare shoulder heartily. He mutters and pulls his arm tighter around Dorian’s waist, and they all laugh.

Dorian struggles ineffectually to get away. “Time for bed, you great lump. You’ll get a crick in your back if you sleep in your chair.”

They eventually lever him out of his seat-- though Dorian notices that he opens his eye and grins cheekily partway through the ordeal-- and he slumps over Dorian’s shoulders and nearly bears him to floor.

More laughter, more good-natured ribbing (Dorian’s not really sure that Rocky’s in any position to be calling Bull an old man) and more goodnights are called as they climb slowly towards Bull’s room.

He steers Bull to the bed and brings him a cup of water before he pulls off his own boots. He sets them carefully by the door, glad of the rugs that Bull dragged up here however many weeks ago. Going barefoot on stone in the darkness of Fereldan winter nights had little charm to begin with and lost it all very quickly. 

Bull is watching him when he turns back to the bed, eye drooping but not bleary. “You’re staying?” he asks, and his cautious smile alone would hold Dorian there.

It’s Dorian who undresses both of them, slow and gentle, with no real intent beyond not sleeping in the day’s clothing. It’s not the first time they’ve spent the night side by side without sex, but he’s strangely conscious of how closely Bull watches him. There’s no heat in it-- not enough that Dorian feels obligated to remind him about his own rules about sex and drunkenness-- but there is something that makes him aware of every time his fingers brush Bull’s skin, every moment of eye contact.

“You were affectionate tonight,” Bull says as Dorian undoes the ties on the over-robe. He sounds fond, he’s even smiling, but Dorian catches another tone underneath that.

“As were you.” He carefully does not rehash every moment in the tavern, looking for some line he could have crossed.

Bull shrugs. “I just remember what you used to say about the people who, y’know, share my seat.”

It’s not at all like him to be this coy, and Dorian feels a rising wave of anxiety. Still, if there’s one thing he’s learned in the South, it’s that there is no space in this room for anything but the truth.

“I was simply making a nuisance of myself.” He fusses with his belts rather than meet Bull’s eyes. “I was jealous that I wasn’t one of them.”

“And now?” Bull’s left hand is tracing patterns on the quilt. “Are you still jealous of them?”

Does he want Dorian to be? He’s had men want that before, for him to be possessive, for him to be jealous of their other lovers, their fiances or wives. Usually it includes snubbing him, not public affection, but it also usually heralds a slow and messy end.

“I’m not.” He says it plainly, and drapes his robes carefully on the back of a chair so that they won’t wrinkle. It also buys him time before he’s naked and in bed beside Bull. “You’re a popular man. I enjoy our time together, but I don’t expect to monopolize it.”

Bull is quiet behind him.

“Did Cremisius tell you that I would? I know he’s a romantic, but exclusivity isn’t something I’ve ever required out of a partner.”

“Requiring’s different from wanting.” Trust Bull to focus on that distinction.

“I haven’t often wanted it. In my experience, it’s neither realistic or fulfilling. Everyone has duties, everyone has the occasional mismatch of desires.”

Bull makes a considering noise. He must be being deliberately obtuse, Dorian thinks. He may be Tal Vashoth now, but he was raised under the Qun, and he’s said himself they don’t do romance like other cultures.

“If you’ve been feeling stifled, I’m sorry,” he begins, because he truly doesn’t want that. “I’m not offended by you spending nights with people. I’m not so selfish as to demand your full attention--”

“Right, right. You don’t want it.” His frown makes Dorian’s nerves key that much tighter. “You’ve still got it, though.”

_Oh._

He feels unobservant and cruelly self-centered. They stare at each other across the room. 

Dorian opens his mouth, then closes it again.

“Knew this was a bad idea,” Bull mutters, and rubs a hand at the base of his horns. His eyepatch is off, and the scars down the side of his face make him look tired. “Forget it Dorian, I’m drunk.”

“No, Bull, wait.” Dorian crosses the room before he quite realizes what his feet are doing. “I’ve hurt you.”

Bull chuckles ruefully. “I can take it.”

“ _Bull_.” This is much worse than he imagined an actual argument with Bull would be. He sits carefully on the bed beside him. “Of course I want your attention--” _that_ sounds awful. How has he survived this long without getting stabbed for his tactlessness?

Dorian chooses his words and tries again: “You know that what you want matters too, don’t you?”

“That’s the thing.” He sounds so frustrated, and shapes his meaning with vague hand motions. “I want to give you what _you_ want, and what you need, and now what _I_ want is all tangled up in what _you_ want, and what I _want_ you to want, and none of this crap makes any _sense_.” It dawns on Dorian that he might be the only person ever to witness this particular state of drunkenness from The Iron Bull.

“Alright,” he says, and tries to think of what to say next.

“What I want,” Bull starts, then takes a breath. “I want to make you happy.”

Dorian puts a hand on Bull’s shoulder, and Bull looks up from where his fingers are twisting together and into his face. Dorian attempts a reassuring expression. “You do.”

Bull’s face melts into a beautiful smile, and Dorian almost thinks that’s the end of the conversation, for tonight. 

“But I’m not the only one for you, like in novels or that crap.”

On the one hand, he finds it sort of adorable that Bull tried to read up on this (and it explains those flowers the other week) but on the other, romance novels are a terrible guide to even the most mundane relationship in Thedas. And the two of them are not exactly mundane.

“No,” he says cautiously. He clears his throat and squares his shoulders. “I’m not sure there is only one man for me. But if there are two, you’re one and I’ve yet to meet the other.”

“Alright,” Bull responds slowly, clearly turning it over in his mind. “That’s alright,” he says again, more confidently.

Against Dorian’s better judgement, that does actually calm him down. “Let’s talk about this again when you’re sober,” he suggests, and stands up to get Bull more water. The man’s an absolute terror when he’s hungover.

“Wait.” Bull grabs at his wrist. “You’re still staying, right?”

“Of course I am.”

“Even if--” He pauses again. Dorian knows that always chooses his words carefully, but it’s rare that he does it so slowly. “Is it alright that I think you’re the only one for me?”

He looks up at Dorian with an expression part defiance, part hope. Dorian looks back. He doesn’t know what his face shows but he feels-- shock, yes, and a bubble of amazement filling his chest. Bull’s easily the most permanent of his partners, the most _important_ , to be honest. He’d assumed that his feelings were the stronger, that they were both attached but that he was the only one irrevocably so...

“More than alright,” he responds faintly. He almost says the rest, but that _really_ should wait until they’re both sober.

“Good.” Bull kisses the inside of his wrist, right over his pulse, and Dorian feels as weak-kneed and light-headed as any maiden in a novel. “I’m not jealous,” Bull continues, “of other men who make you happy. You should be happy all the time.”

Dorian can’t tell him now that he doubts that will always be true. He can’t find the words, with Bull’s eye pinned on him and that _smile_ on his face. He can’t find any words, actually. He remembers that he may be more sober than Bull, but he is definitely still drunk.

“Besides, it’s kinda hot.” Dorian can’t help but laugh at that, and steps back toward the bed, forgetting why he was standing in the first place. There is absolutely nowhere outside of this room that he wants to go.

“That is another conversation we’re saving for later,” he tells Bull, who just grins at him. Dorian lets himself be pulled into a kiss, sweet and soft. 

“You’re staying,” Bull says, still with that hint of a question.

“Yes.” 

“With me.” They can figure out the details later. Dorian needs Bull to believe him entirely. He needs that heartbreaking little hesitation gone.

“As long as you’ll have me, amatus.” He looks into Bull’s eye, tries to wordlessly convey everything he means. “If I’ve been given the gift of your full attention, I must be careful not to squander it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank for reading! <3
> 
> If you liked this, [come say Hi on tumblr!](http://acheesecakewrites.tumblr.com)


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